Feb 3, 2011

US Patent No. 7,818,311

This idea came to me while I was writing the original version of my popular eSqlBlast tool. (Special thanks to my buddy Jarek Kowalski for maintaining it after I left the Entity Framework team.) I needed to parse batches of Entity SQL statements and I didn’t want to spend too much time on that. I figured regular expressions would suffice, but I needed a gigantic regex that I couldn’t write correctly. So I came up with this simple preprocessor that can build gigantic regexes out of many simple ones.